The first commercially attractive cellular telephones or terminals were introduced in the market at the end of the 1980's. Since then, the mobile phone industry has had an enormous development both regarding quality of service and transmission capabilities, as well as the technology for producing advanced communications terminals. A lot of effort has been made in making smaller terminals, with much help from the miniaturisation of electronic components and the development of more efficient batteries. In only a couple of decades the communication systems have gone from analogue to digital, and at the same time the dimensions of the communication terminals have gone from briefcase size to the pocket size phones of today. Today, numerous manufacturers offer pocket-sized terminals with a wide variety of capabilities and services, such as packet-oriented transmission and multiple radio band coverage. Still today, mobile phones are getting smaller and smaller and the size is generally considered to be an important factor for the end customer. The development in electronics has made it possible to miniaturise the components of the terminals, at the same time making the terminals capable of performing more advanced functions and services. The development of new transmission schemes, the so-called 3rd generation mobile system also provides the possibility to convey more advanced data to the wireless communication terminals, such as real time video.
The present and coming generations of mobile systems provide capabilities of transmitting and accessing more advanced data. Still, the memory space in the communication terminal will be limited, as will the processor power usable for processing e.g. media data. So, even if it will be possible to access a wider range of different kinds of data, the terminal may be a limiting factor. Developers of media services or commercials are anxious to be able to provide digital information that can be accessed by the consumers through their terminals, without requiring special terminals, extensive memory space, or occupying a lot of time for downloading and presentation.
A problem related to the field of electronic devices is that in order to read or in other ways render a particular data file, a certain software application must be used by the computer system of the electronic device. This problem is particularly relevant for portable electronic devices, which generally are provided with a limited memory space, and therefore typically carries fewer software applications. So, even if electronic devices often handle many kinds of files and data formats, an electronic device will typically recognize far from all types of formats. A chunk of data can contain loads of information but will stay unknown and useless for the user until he or she installs the proper application for handling the data. An application normally registers the data MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) type to the OS (Operating System). After that the application is asked to handle the data when used.
Today there is not much a user can do with an unknown file. It can be stored and moved but one has to install some kind of application to parse the data to know what it is. Some mobile devices can accept incoming, unknown files and store them in its file system. But the user cannot get any more information from the unknown files than the file system allows; typically name, extension and size.
Some State of the art devices can look up the file extension in a remote data base. If found the user will see some static information about the format itself and perhaps a list of vendors/applications that handles it. Windows® has a lookup service that maps a file extension to a Windows application description. So, in effect, the user has to download and install a new application in order to get any information on the file and its contents.